Thursday, September 29, 2016

The 28 Pages

Saudi Arabia paid millions of dollars to Washington lobbyists to keep it out of court. They have been unsuccessful. And now it is up to the kingdom’s lawyers to limit the damage.

With families of Sept. 11 victims now able to pursue legal claims against the Saudis, the fight over responsibility for the terrorist attacks 15 years ago is likely to shift to a courtroom in Lower Manhattan, not far from where the World Trade Center once stood.

The legal battle could last for years, and would be waged using thousands of pages of documents, deposition transcripts and official government investigations. It could end in millions — or billions — of dollars’ worth of Saudi assets being seized in a court settlement, or a judgment that largely vindicates the Saudi government, which for years has insisted it had no role in the deadly plot ...

I had never read much about the 9/11 investigations, so one of the things I was unaware of before this was The 28 Pages ...

The 28 Pages refers to a section at the end of the 2002 Joint Inquiry into Intelligence Community Activities before and after the Terrorist Attacks of September 11, 2001, conducted by the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence and the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence that contains details of foreign state sponsor support for Al-Qaeda prior to the attack and the Saudi connection to the hijackers. The pages explain that some of the September 11 hijackers received assistance and financial support from individuals connected to the Saudi Arabian government, including Saudi intelligence officers, embassy staff, and members of the Saudi royal family.

In 2016, following a declassification review, the Obama Administration approved the declassification of the partially redacted 28 Pages, the Joint Inquiry’s only wholly classified section. The document was then sent to congressional leadership and on July 15, 2016, the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence approved publication of the newly declassified section.

The 28 pages are from a redacted section of the 422-page inquiry commission report on the 9/11 attacks that include controversial clues linking elements of the Saudi Arabian government and the hijackers. Some leaked information from CIA and FBI documents allege that there is "incontrovertible evidence" that Saudi government officials, including from the Saudi embassy in Washington and consulate in Los Angeles, gave the hijackers both financial and logistical aid. Among those named were then-Saudi Ambassador Prince Bandar and Osama Bassnan, a Saudi agent, as well as American al-Qaeda cleric Anwar al-Awlaki, 9/11 ringleader Mohamed Atta, and Esam Ghazzawi, a Saudi adviser to the nephew of King Fahd.

In July 2016, the U.S. government released a document, compiled by Dana Lesemann and Michael Jacobson, known as "File 17", which contains a list naming three dozen people possibly, among them Fahad al-Thumairy, Omar al-Bayoumi, Osama Bassnan and Mohdhar Abdullah, connecting the Saudi state to the hijackers. According to the former Democratic US Senator Bob Graham, “Much of the information upon which File 17 was written was based on what’s in the 28 pages.”

The 28 pages state that some of the September 11 hijackers received financial support from individuals connected to the Saudi Government. FBI sources believed that at least two of those individuals were Saudi intelligence officers. The U.S. Intelligence Community believed that individuals associated with the Saudi Government had ties to al-Qaeda.

Sunday, September 25, 2016

Music :)

Saturday, September 24, 2016

Arrival: linguistic relativity at the movies

I was at the public library today with my sister. They have a display that features books at the library that have been made into movies and I noticed today that one of the movies in the display was Arrival ...

a 2016 American science fiction drama film directed by Denis Villeneuve and written by Eric Heisserer, based on the short story "Story of Your Life" by author Ted Chiang. The film stars Amy Adams, Jeremy Renner, and Forest Whitaker .... When multiple mysterious spacecraft touch down across the globe, an elite team is put together to investigate, including linguist Louise Banks (Amy Adams), mathematician Ian Donnelly (Jeremy Renner), and US Army Colonel Weber (Forest Whitaker). Mankind teeters on the verge of global war as everyone scrambles for answers—and to find them, Banks, Donnelly, and Weber will take a chance that could threaten their lives, and, quite possibly, humanity.

I took note because had recently watched a trailer for the film at the Apple movie trailer place and thought it looked really interesting. Here's the trailer ...

a science fiction short story by Ted Chiang. It was the winner of the 2000 Nebula Award for Best Novella as well as the 1999 Sturgeon award. The major themes explored by this tale are determinism, language, and an interesting take on the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis.

This film has been in the works since 2012 but recently gained traction after Eric Heisserer (The Thing remake, Lights Out) revised the script and Adams and Renner signed on. Renner, who plays physicist Ian Donnelly, told USA Today that the movie’s tone is “if you blended a [Stanley] Kubrick and a [Steven] Spielberg movie,” and that the end result comes out closer to Contact or Close Encounters of the Third Kind than “a big Michael Bay alien movie”—which makes sense, since the entire story is about first contact. Summoned by the military, linguist Louise Banks (Adams) must learn the aliens’ two languages: the verbal Heptapod A, with its free word order, and the much more complex and visual Heptapod B.

Reeling from personal turmoil, Louise struggles to relate to these otherworldly creatures. Adams praised the fact that “[t]his isn’t a graphic-novel universe or creating a new universe. This happens in our world today, as it exists. Not having to transport myself to a universe where superheroes exist, which is also fun, really helped me ground the character and the experience.” Speaking of worldbuilding, she said, “Denis and the team have done a great job with the visuals and getting to something that looks familiar and not completely abstract.” ......

[A]lso known as the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis or Whorfianism, [it] is a concept-paradigm in linguistics and cognitive science that holds that the structure of a language affects its speakers' cognition or world view. It used to have a strong version that claims that language determines thought and that linguistic categories limit and determine cognitive categories. The more accepted weak version claims that linguistic categories and usage only influence thoughts and decisions.

I vaguely remember this stuff from philosophy classes in college ... Quine, Searle, Wittgenstein. I found it hard to understand but this short video is pretty good at explaining it ....

Applying this stuff to an encounter with aliens should be interesting :)

a 2016 American dark fantasy action adventure film based on characters from the German fairy tale "Snow White" compiled by the Brothers Grimm, as well as "The Snow Queen" by Hans Christian Andersen. Both a prequel and sequel to Snow White and the Huntsman, the film takes place before and after the events of the first film .... Reprising their roles from the first film, the cast includes Chris Hemsworth, Charlize Theron, Nick Frost and Sam Claflin. The film also introduces new characters including Emily Blunt, Rob Brydon and Jessica Chastain

I had seen the first Huntsman movie ... Snow White and the Huntsman ... and thought it was so-so, but I liked this one a bit better, though the critics seem to have liked it less. The main problem with this Huntsman movie, from my pov anyway, is that it's mostly about form over function .... we have to spend what seems like hours marveling at the make-up and costumes and sets and flawless faces of Charlize Theron and Emily Blunt ... but the story-line is just kind of dopey. Sadly, even Chris Hemsworth can't really fix it.

If you liked “Frozen” but wish it had been angrier, “The Huntsman: Winter’s War” is for you.

It’s a tale of two royal sisters, one of whom discovers in a fit of rage that she has the ability to shoot ice from her fingertips—so she exiles herself to a faraway land in the mountains, where she creates her own kingdom and builds her own army. She even wears decadent gowns in various shades of pale blue and pulls her hair back in elaborate braids.

Monday, September 19, 2016

Baby possum

The last few days I've been hearing a crunching sound coming from the porch but when I would go and look I couldn't see anything. Today when I heard the sound I crept up to the front window with the binoculars I use to see far away (to me) things better, and there was a baby possum on the front porch eating the cat food. I stealthily got the camera :)

The cats are nonplussed by him ... he's as small as a medium sized rat but they don't seem to think he's edible and didn't bother him. When I came up to the door he saw me and ran away under the house. Usually the possums around here only come out at night and I've never seen a baby before. A few weeks ago my sister and I found a dead possum by the side of the road - I wonder if that was his parent? Groan - please tell me he's not going to cat # 11.

Sunday, September 18, 2016

Cold Days

Now I'm listening to Cold Days (The Dresden Files, Book 14). The series is about a wizard who's a private investigator. It's an electronic audio file from the public library that I listen to in my browser, so very convenient. I've been listening to all the Dresden Files books over again while I walk ... they're interesting enough to distract me from the drudgery of exercise :). Here's what's happening where I am now ...

I’m never really comfortable at parties. Maybe I’m just not the partying type.

Even when they aren’t full of lunatic elves, hulking monsters, and psychotic faerie queens, parties are kind of tough for me. I think it’s because I’m never sure of what to do with myself.

I mean, there’re drinks, but I don’t like being drunk, and I’m pretty sure I don’t get any more charming when I do get that way. More amusing, tops, and that isn’t always in a good way. There’s music, but I never really learned to dance to anything that involved an electric guitar. There are people to talk to and maybe girls to flirt with, but once you put all the stupid things I do aside, I’m really not all that interesting. I like reading, staying home, going on walks with my dog — it’s like I’m already a retiree. Who wants to hear about that? Especially when I would have to scream it over the music to which no one dances.
So I’m there but not drinking, listening to music but not dancing, and trying to have conversations with near-strangers about anything other than my own stupid life, and they generally seem to have the same goals I do. Leads to a lot of awkward pauses. And then I start wondering why I showed up in the first place.

Hell’s bells, the kind of party with monsters is actually easier for me. I mean, at least I have a pretty good idea of what to do when I’m at one of those.

Saturday, September 17, 2016

Coming to a theater near us

I saw an article in the news today about the movie trailers you should be watching, but most of the movies mentioned there were ones I'd never sign up to see, so I thought I'd post a few trailers of the movies *I'm* looking forward to seeing soon :) ...

Captain America: Civil War

a 2016 American superhero film featuring the Marvel Comics character Captain America .... and features an ensemble cast, including Chris Evans, Robert Downey Jr., Scarlett Johansson, Sebastian Stan, Anthony Mackie, Don Cheadle, Jeremy Renner, Chadwick Boseman, Paul Bettany, Elizabeth Olsen, Paul Rudd, Emily VanCamp, Tom Holland, Frank Grillo, William Hurt, and Daniel Brühl. In Captain America: Civil War, disagreement over international oversight of the Avengers fractures them into opposing factions—one led by Steve Rogers and the other by Tony Stark.

The basic plot has some similarities with the recent Batman v Superman movie in that they both touch on accountability for super-beings ... what about all the collateral damage to innocent bystanders and to property inevitably caused when the Avengers are saving the world from bad guys? The solution proposed by the US Secretary of State (William Hurt) is the Sokovia Accords, which will have the UN decide if and when the Avengers are deployed to meet threats. Tony Stark/Iron Man wants the Avengers to sign the Accords, but Steve Rogers/Captain America is against it, and the other Avengers take sides. Things get much worse when a conference in Vienna where the Accords are to be signed is attacked, apparently by Captain America's missing and brain-washed friend, the Winter Soldier (see Captain America: The Winter Soldier).

What ensues is complicated, but basically, the Avengers split up and fight against each other. Several new characters get added to the team on both sides. One of them is the Black Panther (Chadwick Boseman) ...

And Steve Rogers/Captain America recruits Ant-Man/Scott Lang. Now I guess I finally have to watch the Ant-Man movies after all :). But anyway, here's a clip of him in Civil War ...

And then there's Spider-Man. Tony Stark/Iron Man recruits him in a pretty funny scene which they won't let me embed, and it was hard to find a good clip showing him in the film - I guess they wanted to keep the Spidey suspense alive until after the movie debuted, but you can catch glimpses of him (and Ant-Man too) in this featurette ...

I really liked the film myself - I'm completely addicted now and have been since I was a little kid to all things Marvel - so I do recommend it. And while there's humor and lots of action in the movie, it also raises some serious questions too, questions I wonder how I would answer ... will you let grief at the loss of loved ones change you for better or worse ... will you honor friendship even at a cost to yourself ... will you give your moral agency over to an organization or will you be personally responsible for your ethical choices.

Tuesday, September 13, 2016

Pardon Snowden

Sunday, September 11, 2016

Roses

Saturday, September 10, 2016

More from Changes

I'm still listening to Changes and have come to a part where Harry and his friends are about to go off to rescue a little girl from evil vampires. While they were getting ready, they were deciding who each of them resembled most of the characters of The Lord of the Rings. Harry, being a wizard, was sure he would have been Gandalf, but instead he was chosen as Sam ...

"Sanya," I said. "Who did I get cast as?"

"Sam," Sanya said.

I blinked at him. "Not . . . Oh, for crying out loud, it was perfectly obvious who I should have been."

Sanya shrugged. "It was no contest. They gave Gandalf to your godmother. You got Sam." He started to leave and then paused. "Harry. You have read the books as well, yes?"

"Sure," I said.

"Then you know that Sam was the true hero of the tale," Sanya said. "That he faced far greater and more terrible foes than he ever should have had to face, and did so with courage. That he went alone into a black and terrible land, stormed a dark fortress, and resisted the most terrible temptation of his world for the sake of the friend he loved. That in the end, it was his actions and his actions alone that made it possible for light to overcome darkness."

I thought about that for a second. Then I said, "Oh."

He clapped me on the shoulder and left.

He didn't mention the other part of the book. That following the heroes when they set out was the tenth member of their party. A broken creature who went through all the same dangers and trials, who had made a single bad choice and taken up a power he didn't understand - and who had become a demented, miserable, living nightmare because of it. In the end, he had been just as necessary to the overthrow of the darkness.

But he sure as hell didn't enjoy his part.

I shook my head and berated myself sharply. Here I was wasting time talking about a damned book. About a world of blacks and whites with precious little in the way of grey, where you could tell the good guys from the bad guys with about two seconds of effort.

And right now, I didn't give a damn about good and bad. I just wanted a little girl home safe.

Friday, September 09, 2016

Throwback Thursday: concerts

OK, my sister has informed me that it's Friday, not Thursday, but I don't care :) When I was in high school/college my sister and I went to a lot of concerts. My parents were pretty good about giving us rides when we were younger and living so near San Francisco meant we had the opportunity to see many bands. Here are a few performers that I saw in concert back in the day ....

Kathryn Brand: The Jesuits’ Slaves

There's been much in the Catholic news lately about Jesuit Georgetown University making amends for its slave-owning, and I guess the Maryland Jesuits deserve credit for finally dealing with this, but it's been a long time coming. I mentioned the subject a year ago ... Links ... after reading an article in The Georgetown Voice by Kathryn Brand, published back in 2007. Here's the beginning of the article ...

“Can a man serve God faithfully and posess slaves?” Brother Joseph Mobberly, S.J. asked in his diary in 1818. “Yes,” he answered. “Is it then lawful to keep men in servitude? Yes.”

The Jesuits of the Maryland province had always relied on plantations to support their ministries. The estates were extensive, totaling 12,000 acres on four large properties in Southern Prince Georges, Charles and St. Mary’s counties, and two smaller estates on Maryland’s Eastern Shore. In 1634, when the Jesuits arrived in Maryland, Lord Baltimore awarded them quasi-estates in which they were permitted to live off the rent of tenant farmers. However, as University Dean Hubert Cloke explains, “The system was totally antiquated and romantic, not related to reality, and they realized they were not going to make any money.” So, the Jesuits turned to indentured servants, English men and women who worked the land for set terms in return for the passage from England to Maryland. But as working conditions improved in England, the supply of indentured servants dropped and the Jesuits once again found a new way to work the land. By the 1680s they relied upon a fully developed slave system.

Compared to other plantation owners in the area, when it came to slavery, “The Jesuits were no better or worse,” according to Cloke. Many of the slaves had been gifts from wealthy Catholic families to sustain the Church. The abolition of slavery was not an issue in the area until the early nineteenth century, when Georgetown’s Jesuits became deeply divided over the issue of slavery.

“But they were not conflicted in the way you would want,” Cloke said. “They were conflicted over what to do about the threat of abolitionists.”

In a generational divide, an older group of Jesuits, mostly European born, felt a patriarchal connection to their slaves and were unwilling to sell them. A younger, American-born group, a minority, felt that the money invested in plantations should be spent on institutions in cities like Philadelphia and New York with their rapidly growing Catholic populations. It seems neither faction had any particular moral quandaries with the six plantations and the nearly 300 slaves owned by Georgetown’s and Maryland’s Jesuits.

This rift is just one of the things American Studies students learned when history professors like Cloke and Emmett Curran introduced the Jesuit Plantation Project into the American Studies curriculum in the spring of 1996. The project involved students transcribing and digitizing hundreds of documents from the Jesuit’s Maryland Province Index recording the Georgetown’s Jesuits’ complicated relationship with slavery.

With only two exceptions, all the higher-ranking Jesuits in the province during the time were foreign-born and of the older faction. Since only U.S. citizens had temporal jurisdiction, foreign Jesuits had no authority over the Mission’s estates.

This meant that a younger group of American Jesuits, a minority, controlled the destiny of the estates, and this group wanted to end slave operations.

“They considered the plantations and slaves as a losing business enterprise and thought the Society should rid itself of both plantations and slaves,” Curran said.

Abolitionists presented an economic rather than moral problem for these Jesuits. With a growing abolitionist presence in Maryland, some of them feared a devaluation of their property, their slaves. Maryland was a state in which slavery had a tenuous hold, the economy was no longer driven by slave labor. According to reports, the general debt of the mission was close to $32,000 by the 1830s, a large sum for the time.

“It was not a market for growing crops, but for growing slaves,” said Cloke. The real money was to be made not from the work a slave could do in Maryland, but from the hugely profitable business of selling the slaves downriver ....

Wednesday, September 07, 2016

Changes

[T]here were some things I believed in. Some things I had faith in. And faith isn't about perfect attendance to services, or how much money you put on the little plate. It isn't about going skyclad to the Holy Rites, or meditating each day upon the divine. Faith is about what you do. It's about aspiring to be better and nobler and kinder than you are. It's about making sacrifices for the good of others - even when there's not going to be anyone telling you what a hero you are.

Tuesday, September 06, 2016

First Things defends the burqa and burkini

If one needed any further evidence that it is the *conservative* view that supports burqa and burkini wearing, and not the liberal view, there's a post at First Things that criticizes the burqa and burkini bans in France: Burkinis, Anabaptists, and Living One’s Faith. It doesn't have an auspicious beginning ...

The image has been making its rounds on news sites and social media: a French Muslim woman sitting on the beach, being forced, in the name of “good morals and secularism,” to remove her clothes. Last week, Nice was the last city to lift the Burkini Ban, in accordance with an order from France’s Council of State, which ruled that the ban “illegally breached fundamental freedoms.” But the veiling debate—which has been going on for years in France—is clearly not over.

As a woman who dresses modestly and wears a head covering on the basis of my Christian faith, I have been thinking about the issues involved here for a while. In a class last year, we were informally discussing the brutal attacks at the Charlie Hebdo offices. I come from a tradition of Christian pacifism. I find all acts of violence to be indefensible and unjustifiable. But I found myself saying: “But if I saw blasphemous cartoons of Jesus . . . if I wasn’t allowed to dress according to my convictions publicly . . .” I got a table-full of blank stares. I sounded like an apologist. My argument trailed off into a lame “I don’t know—.” ...

One can't help but wonder how she would have finished her statement, “But if I saw blasphemous cartoons of Jesus . . ." What, she would have gunned down the artist?

The post goes on to assert things that are not true ... France is forcing its Muslim citizens to make this choice: To be French, or to be Muslim. Wrong - wearing those garments is not required by Islam and in fact most Muslim women choose not to wear them.

The way I dress seems to invite people to think in these terms, and to assert the principle that the spiritual life should not be lived in public ... if faith has any strength it must move beyond this misguided Manichean distinction between spirit and matter, to shape my actual life.

Conservatives often worry about liberals and secularists forcing religion into a private practice and out of the public square, but there's no sign that's happening ... we live in a country where most of the Supreme Court is made up of conservative Catholics, where the president is a Protestant and the VP a Catholic, where the Little Sisters of the Poor can sue the government over birth control. Come on.

I know that ultimately my faith takes precedence over my citizenship. I pray that the day will never come when I will be forced to choose between them. If I were to be faced with this choice—if the expression of my faith were not allowed in public—my response would be to continue to live according to my convictions, taking a cue from Martin Luther King Jr., “openly, lovingly, and with a willingness to accept the penalty.”

Yes, protesting the right to wear a scarf, a right that will never be questioned in the US, ranks right up there with civil rights protests .... not. But anyway, in a pluralistic society in which citizens believe in many different religions and some in none, it's necessary to preserve freedom of belief and worship while also regulating how people act .... complete religious freedom of action can only exist in a vacuum or in a ghetto.

But anyway, I'm just saying, again, that the support of garments like the burqa and burkini is a conservative position, despite the recent liberal embrace of such. Thank you, First Things, for making my point. Here are a few of my past posts touching on this ...

Monday, September 05, 2016

Colony

an American science-fiction drama television series created by Carlton Cuse and Ryan J. Condal, starring Josh Holloway and Sarah Wayne Callies .... In a dystopian, near-future Los Angeles, a couple, Katie (Callies) and Will (Holloway) Bowman, live with two of their three children, under a regime of military occupation by an organization known as the Colony Transitional Authority. They are part of a larger invading force, of extraterrestrial origin, who are referred to as the "Hosts" ...

I signed up for the show because I like Josh Holloway, who was also in Lost . In Colony he plays a former U.S. Army Ranger, and FBI Special Agent who is living under an assumed name/identity to protect himself and his family after the aliens take over. He's found out when trying to find his missing son and forced to work for the collaborators, helping to expose the leaders of the human resistance to the alien occupation. Little does he know, however, that his wife is part of that resistance. I've only seen one episode so far but I like it.

Mother Teresa and The Lancet

There's an article at America magazine's blog by Fr. James Martin SJ which criticizes Mother Teresa's critics and compares her to Jesus. I don't agree with his view, and that led me look up a past article in the medical journal, The Lancet, by the editor, Dr. Robin Fox. He had visited Mother Teresa's Home for the Dying and wrote about what he saw there ... "Mother Theresa's care for the dying", Robin Fox, Lancet, 9/17/1994, Vol. 344 Issue 8925, p807. 2p. Here below is a bit from the article (which was free online from my public library).

Many of the patients there were not actually dying but simply ill. The medical care they received was "haphazard", with doctors dropping in only once in a while and most care being given by volunteers or nuns, only some of whom had any medical knowledge. Illnesses were misdiagnosed, wrong medications prescribed, and routine diagnostic tests were not given to patients ... "Could not someone have looked at a blood film? Investigations, I was told, are seldom permissible. How about simple algorithms that might help the sisters and volunteers distinguish the curable from the incurable? Again no. Such systematic approaches are alien to the ethos of the home. Mother Theresa prefers providence to planning;" And then there was the subject of pain management ... "I was disturbed to learn that the formulary includes no strong analgesics. Along with the neglect of diagnosis, the lack of good analgesia marks Mother Theresa's approach as clearly separate from the hospice movement."

Mother Teresa has said that "suffering is gift from God". I don't believe the creepy notion that suffering is a good thing, that God sends it to us, that we should not try to alleviate it but embrace it. That a person who believes this should be in control of the treatment of dying and ill patients is just wrong. When Mother Teresa herself was sick and suffering, she went to high tech medical centers like the Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla. The words "double standard" come to mind.

Trumpet flower

More on Mother Teresa's canonization

I have an earlier post about her canonization here, but on this, the day Mother Teresa is being canonized by Pope Francis, here's a bit from an article at CNN that exemplifies why I think she should not be a saint ....

[...] Disillusioned former volunteer Hemley Gonzalez didn't meet her in person, but what he calls the "horrific remnants of her legacy" have left him deeply uncomfortable. After visiting the facilities she's responsible for starting, he feels only a "troubled individual" could have set them up.

After the financial crisis of 2008, Gonzalez took a break from his real estate business in Miami and headed to India, where he spent two months volunteering at Nirmal Hriday, a home for the dying run by Mother Teresa's Missionaries of Charity in Calcutta's (now Kolkata) crowded Kalighat area.

Gonzalez says he was appalled at the poor level of hygiene and medical care he saw there. He says the organization didn't vet him or the other volunteers. None, including himself, had any medical experience or received any training before working at the hospice.

He claims he saw nuns routinely reuse needles after washing them in tap water, that clothes -- sometimes soiled with urine and feces -- and cooking utensils were hand washed side by side in the same room.

Patients suffering from respiratory diseases had to bathe in freezing water because a single water heater wasn't barely enough for one bath, he says. And he claims there was not a single doctor or medically trained nurse at the hospice.

"It was a scene out of a World War II concentration camp," says Gonzalez.

Gonzalez says attempts to raise a red flag or offer to install a water heater were always met with the same response by the nuns. "We don't do that here. This is the way Jesus wants it, they'd say," Gonzalez tells us.

[...]

Since the group receives millions of dollars in donations from around the world, they say they should use it to build hospitals, schools and to upgrade their facilities.

It's true there's no transparency -- and very little information available -- on the group's bookkeeping. CNN's request to interview the current head of the organization was declined.

"The funds are coming," Sister Joan of Arc, head of the children's shelter in Kolkata, told CNN. "We can feed every hungry mouth every day. It's the miracle of love." Questions about funds are often met with a similar response.

That doesn't satisfy the critics. As a registered charity operating in over a 100 countries, they say there needs to be some accountability, as there is with groups such as The Red Cross or Oxfam.

"Why is this organization not being held to the same standard?" asks Gonzalez. "They get a free pass because of religion; they get a free pass because of the influence of the Vatican."

[...]

Even her path to sainthood has been controversial.

To become a saint, Pope Francis had to approve two miracles. One of them involved a rural woman, Monica Besra, who claims she was cured of cancer after praying to Mother Teresa.

Monica says she was cured by Mother Teresa's blessings and not by doctor's treatment.

"I took doctors' medicines, threw up and was in a lot of pain. But when I prayed to Mother Teresa from my heart, Mother Teresa blessed me and now I am healthy," she told CNN. "My entire village and I am very happy that she is being made a saint."

However, critics dispute this version of events — they say it was modern medicine and not a miracle that healed her. And some doctors claim her tumor was a cyst caused by tuberculosis, rather than a cancerous tumor.

"Our organization does not believe in any kind of miracle," Prabir Ghosh, General Secretary of Science and Rationalists' Association of India, told CNN.

According to Ghosh, Monica Besra's husband said as much to him in 2003. Ghosh told CNN that he has him on video saying his wife was cured by medicine, rather than Mother Teresa.

In an interview with TIME magazine in 2002, Besra's husband also challenged the Vatican's claim. "It is much ado about nothing," he told TIME. "My wife was cured by the doctors and not by any miracle."

However, Besra has since denied these statements. This week, he told CNN he stands by Mother Teresa's miracle and never made the comments to TIME ....

[...] The most formidable of her critics was another British journalist, Christopher Hitchens, who in 1994 made a film called Hell’s Angel. It claimed that Mother Teresa treated the symptoms of poverty while ignoring the causes. She took money from distasteful political figures and rich fraudsters, and didn’t publish any accounts. Her Catholic opposition to abortion and contraception made her a religious fundamentalist. Her Kolkata home for the dying had poor medical standards. It all constituted, Hitchens railed, a “cult of death and suffering”.

Should all that disqualify her from being a saint? Hitchens’s critique is polemical – his 1995 book on her is framed with attacks on religion in general – but it airs concerns raised by an Indian doctor, Aroup Chatterjee. It has interviews with volunteers from the Kolkata Home for the Dying Destitutes, who spoke of needles reused without sterilising them, too few drips, and little pain control beyond aspirin. The Lancet visited in 1994, and said the home failed to distinguish between dying patients and those who could be cured.

All this stemmed, critics said, from Mother Teresa’s archaic religious attitude to suffering, which she saw as “beautiful” because it enabled poor people to “share in the passion of Christ” – though that did not prevent her from being treated in expensive medical facilities when she herself was ill.

It was not a view all the dying shared. When she told one man “you are suffering like Christ on the cross, so Jesus must be kissing you,” he replied: “Then please tell him to stop kissing me.” Mother Teresa was unrepentant, insisting that a home for the dying was not a hospital. “We are not nurses, we are not doctors, we are not teachers, we are not social workers,” she said: “We are religious ...

But anyway, she's passed the litmus test - coming up with two miracles to prove her saint-worthy. In the modern era, the miracles named to canonize always seem to be medical, as opposed to miracles having to do with controlling nature or raising the dead: How The Catholic Church Documented Mother Teresa's 2 Miracles ... [A] woman in India whose stomach tumor disappeared and a man in Brazil with brain abscesses who awoke from a coma both credited their dramatic recovery to prayers offered to the nun after her death in 1997.

That's one thing I've never understood since becoming a Catholic - why do people pray to saints (or blesseds) instead of praying directly to Jesus/God? I find it just disturbing to believe God could be more influenced by the nagging of celebrity dead people than by the average person's direct prayers. Here conservative Robert Barron goes to pretzel-ish lengths to make this idea sound coherent ... we're not praying "to" the saints, we're praying "through" them .... God is all about delegating responsibility. I'm unconvinced ....